The end of anti-Woke hysteria? Barbie draws $155MM in North America alone
“Go woke, go broke.”
That’s what our right-wing overlords have been telling us. Make a movie, a beer commercial, a t-shirt that doesn’t fall in line with the excruciatingly narrow view the Right has of What We May Be and What We May Do, and go bankrupt immediately. Good upstanding films like Sound of Freedom - that’s what you want.
And then comes Greta Gerwig. She directed what is quite possibly the most woke movie it is possible to make…and like a pink-painted 2x6 upside Ron DeSantis’ go-go-boot-wearin’ empty melon head, in three freakin’ days it went into the black. It did $155 million US and Canada box office, $337 million worldwide. Since a film only needs to make double its production budget to cross into profit-making territory, Gerwig’s $100 million fantasy flick became profitable sometime on Saturday. It is quite appalling…well, for all the people who hate “woke” without even being able to define woke.
And it did it without “pay it forward” money laundering schemes that led scores of exhibitors to project Sound of Freedom to “sold out” auditoriums with six pairs of actual eyeballs in them. No sirree, $155 million worth of moviegoers, many wearing frilly dresses and pink lipstick like the title character, walked into movie houses and REALLY WATCHED THE MOVIE!
I suspect three things are at play here.
First, it’s a fun movie. Even the people screaming about how all this wokeness is going to bring on the immolation of America liked it, but they’ll never admit to it.
Second, it’s something new. It isn’t based on a comic book, a remake of some flick from 50 years ago that we just hadda make because we already rented the camera and bought the hairspray, or another “Christians are SOOOO persecuted” two-hour whinefest.
But the most important, to my eye, is that people are getting fed the hell up with the Hard Right dictating our lives. They want to control what we can do to our bodies, put in our bodies, read, watch, do and think. We’ve had it. We are speaking up. If the opening salvo is to swipe a bit of sparkly shadow across our eyelids before heading out to see a silly movie…well, so be it.
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